Question: This video is from a track on Kendrick Lamar’s new album, DAMN. In it, Lamar catalogs a number of qualities, both admirable and suspect, that live inside of his personal DNA. When I think about non-separation, my thoughts automatically angle towards God. If I asked Kendrick Lamar what is in God’s DNA, what do you think he would say?
Michael Richardson-Borne: Why do you feel this is important? Let him say whatever is said through him and leave it alone. Understand what is thought of as “his voice” is the voice of the impersonal. See that he is being spoken and that the experience he portrays is a reflection of who you are. There are enough prediction and projection in the world without us, two puppets of consciousness, adding to the divisive roar of the separate, right?
The more pressing question is are you here to discover the essence of God’s DNA as it pertains to your own experience? Are you here as a living part of your own path, or are you trying to see the world from somebody else’s perspective in order to adopt it as a post mortem philosophy to live by?
Q: I hear what you’re saying, but could you please take a minute to answer my question? It’s for a larger research project I am working on for my graduate studies.
MR-B: Nice. Sounds like an institution where credentials for individuals matter. My kind of place.
I could see Kendrick Lamar going one of two ways when it comes to the attributes in God’s DNA. He’d either take the traditional Christian route where his line of thinking anthropomorphizes God and projects what fundamentalist religions typically associate with their deities – paternal love, mercy, power, and wisdom. Or he’d associate the qualities in God’s DNA with his own personal experiences in Compton, California coupled with the challenges of living the life of hip hop stardom – which would include survivor’s aspects like ruggedness, rebelliousness, mental strength, perseverance, and resilience.
But both of these explanations of God’s DNA wouldn’t be describing anything other than a mental overlaying of one linguistic object on another, neither of which is real. In the Christian example, Lamar would be separating out a fictional God who could be in relationship with the separated story of a fictional self. And this fictional God and fictional self would be stories in his mind that could be, you guessed it, in relationship with more concepts – all of which would be mere mental manifestations of Lamar’s mind and empowered with an independent existence that was not their own. The other example of the Compton survivor would be him separating out the story of a fictional self who could be in relationship with a fictional environment or experience that would lead to the same end as the first example – a belief in concepts that describes layers of unrealness of the unreal.
If you look closely enough, you will see that both of Lamar’s answers I have fashioned are rooted in the assumption of a separate self – and, with that, are just simple translations of one another. They are saying the exact same thing with a different string of letters and phonemes. This is how the world of separation works. It’s a land of infinite translation of the same mistake. It’s a land where people get lost in the particular and forget the underlying agreement of separation that was unconsciously made. The separate self is a global gospel that demands things are always changing, maybe even evolving – but this is just our version of a dark-time translation, an infatuation with history’s latest version of the dogma of separation.
If you listen to Lamar’s new album top to bottom, you will find that this is the kind of change he is calling for. He is welcoming the black community to stop identifying with the color of their supposed race, and to instead identify as “Israelites,” the chosen people of God. But, again, this isn’t change – it’s just another obtuse translation of separation, a separative act of swapping one bogus projection on a false self for another.
Even talking about what is “in” God’s DNA is a way of living in a separative context. By having an agreement firmly entrenched in separation, we are allowing God’s DNA to be separated out as an imaginary storehouse to be filled with particulars. Neither the concept of God’s DNA, the particulars, nor the story of the self who thinks he is holding the concept of God’s DNA and the particulars, has a foundation in reality. This whole exercise for your graduate studies chalks up to a stubborn practice of remaining embedded in mental specifics to the detriment of realizing your real being.
Q: I understand that everything is in God’s DNA. But how would you describe the nature of God’s genetic code?
MR-B: As I just pointed out, everything is not “in” God’s DNA. That’s separation. Even what you think of as God’s DNA is an object being lived by God – so the nature of God’s genetic code is the nature of God, which is non-separation.
From non-separation, the specifics of God’s DNA are full of life – but not as free-standing specifics. Do you see what I’m pointing to? Any division imposed on objects within your awareness is a temporary point of view lived into existence as a processional effect of non-separation. Just as bees pollinate flowers as an accidental byproduct of making honey, non-separation lives what you think of as your separate self as a byproduct of its natural movement.
When asked what is in God’s DNA, the separative bees might say things like “pollen, honeycombs, flight, and sunlight.” But the answer of the wiser bees would be, “Who cares? We’re all the same essence as God’s DNA and what’s supposedly in it. Any separation is imagined. We merely watch the honey being made through bees as an activity of that which we are.” Imagine Kendrick Lamar writing an album from the “wise bee” realization.
Q: How is the nature of your, or my, genetic code different from God’s?
MR-B: There is no difference. And the same goes for Kendrick Lamar. God’s DNA has the same nature as Kendrick Lamar’s DNA. It’s not separate. It’s not even an it.
The nature of all forms of DNA is non-separation.
Q: Biologists, chemists, physicists, and philosophers all believe they have the purview of life’s deepest truths. The religious and the spiritual claim to have the same thing. How are we supposed to know who or what to believe?
MR-B: The posture of owning the “deepest truth” has its foundation in the assumption of separation. The separate self is an expert at idealizing its own partiality – so trying to absolutize an extracted piece of the whole like physics or spirituality seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do from the perspective of separation.
As for you and what to believe – I’d suggest believing your own experience. Trust consciousness to reveal exactly what you need to know. Study your own experience deeply. Continuously return to your sense of being. Be at peace with what you discover while maintaining a healthy sense of curiosity. Understand how your mind works. Locate what is aware of it. Ask what you were before this awareness. Rest in this question.
And if studying biology, chemistry, physics, religion, or spirituality takes place – then let it happen and rest in that too. Truth isn’t something to believe or to be figured out. Truth is a lived experience and is not involved in a separated competition of depth. The very question or concern about what to believe is just another activity of that which you already are.
Q: Physical characteristics are passed on via genes. Mental ideas and world-views are spread through the use of memes. Is there something spiritually parallel to this that carries the transmission of awakening or non-separation?
MR-B: Awakening is not transmitted by anyone or any thing. Why? Because there is nothing in our world to give or to receive transmission. The movement of objects (physical, conceptual, or spiritual) from one being to another is an imaginary activity of separation. Awakening is never handed off like some cosmic baton – it’s always present whether you are aware of it or not. So the here-to-there separative mechanism does not apply except as a mirage-like joke of non-separation. You’re either laughing or you’re not.
Q: If there is no spiritually-based genetic material to pass on, why do you talk about non-separation with other people? What’s in it for you?
MR-B: There is nothing in it for the me you think you’re talking to. There is everything in it for that which is living the me you think you’re talking to.
Those who know Non-separation may effortlessly command what we’ll call love and devotion. This wordless invitation doesn’t have to be a shady, over-bearing power trip – it can be a gentle, impersonal recognition that occurs as a spontaneous curiosity welling up inside of you. Again, this is not something that can be forced or that is tainted by any sense of seduction. There’s an innocence present, a calm quality of the real, that has no demands but still sits anchored in what can be thought of as a confusing, hands-off, sense of control.
The knower of non-separation requires love & devotion, not for him or herself, but because they are love and devotion. Their being has situated the separate self into its proper role. They know that by giving love and devotion to love and devotion, the opportunity arises for one to return to the self.
At first, you may think that you are devoted to a person, but with time, you will realize that what you have been devoted to was your very self. You will discover that you were in relationship with an open space of love and devotion, a mere mirror to your own depth and being. By showing up as a living presence of love and devotion, the woman or man who knows non-separation is inviting everyone to return to their true nature, which is not separate from what you asked about earlier – the true nature of God’s genetic code.